9 Chilean students selected to carry out research internships at Inria in France under the Inria Chile Program

The Inria Chile Research Internship Program was created in 2018 with three main objectives: 

• To train students from Chilean universities partnered with Inria Chile by placing them in an environment of scientific excellence;
• To contribute to the attractiveness of Inria and its research teams;
• To strengthen scientific collaboration between Inria teams and partner universities in Chile.

After 8 years, the Program has had a positive impact on all these objectives, training 96 Chilean students (as of 2026) in Inria teams in France and fostering the creation of new Franco-Chilean scientific collaborations and projects.

Each year, Inria launches a national call for scientific topics, while the five Chilean universities partnered with the Program open a call for applications to their students, focused on digital sciences and technologies and, in 2026, on the priority areas of Inria Chile and of the Franco-Chilean Binational Center for Artificial Intelligence operated by Inria Chile, with a focus on:

• Foundational and agentic AI
• Safe AI
• AI orchestration: frugal and Edge
• AI-Accelerated Science
• AI adoption

The selected students carry out their 3-month internships with scholarships financed jointly by Inria and their respective universities. More than 30% of the students participate in a scientific publication thanks to this experience, and more than 25% present the results of their research work at scientific conferences.

In September 2026, nine students from the Universidad de Chile and the Universidad de Concepción were selected. Thanks to this Program and to the support of Inria and their respective universities, the students will carry out research internships in research teams at various Inria centers in France during the first half of 2027. With this new generation, 105 Chilean students will have benefited from this internationalization program, training alongside scientists at the forefront of research in artificial intelligence.

At the Inria Centre at Université Côte d'Azur:

• Nicolás Garay Cerda, a student of Civil Mathematical Engineering and the Master's in Engineering Sciences with a specialization in Applied Mathematics in the Department of Mathematical Engineering of the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at the Universidad de Chile, will carry out his internship in the GREENOWL team, supervised by scientist Olivier Bernard, on the topic "Hybrid modelling and evolutionary dynamics of phytoplankton adaptation to global warming."
• Alfredo Padilla Loyola, a student of Civil Mathematical Engineering and the Master's in Engineering Sciences with a specialization in Applied Mathematics in the Department of Mathematical Engineering of the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at the Universidad de Chile, will carry out his internship in the GREENOWL team, under the supervision of Francesca Casagli, on the topic "Symbolic regression for biological law discovery."
• Daniel Hermosilla Rojas, a student of Civil Industrial Engineering and the Master's in Operations Research in the Department of Industrial Engineering of the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at the Universidad de Chile, will carry out his internship in the BIOVISION team under the supervision of researcher Bruno Cessac on the topic "Confronting experiments and simulations in the retina."
• Matías Miranda Cabrera, a student of Civil Computer Engineering and the Master of Science with a specialization in Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science of the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at the Universidad de Chile, will carry out his internship on "Deep generative models for the joint analysis of text and network data" in the MAASAI team, under the supervision of Charles Bouveyron.

At the Inria Centre at the University of Lille:

• Roberto La Rosa Quiroz, a student of Civil Mathematical Engineering in the Department of Mathematical Engineering of the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at the Universidad de Chile, will carry out his internship on "Learning-Enhanced Optimization for Integrated Dial-a-Ride Problems," under the supervision of Yue Su in the INOCS team.
• Vicente Saenger Derache, a PhD student from the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Concepción, will carry out a research stay in the INOCS team with researcher Frédéric Semet on the topic "Territory design with stochastic demand: A hybrid machine learning - mathematical optimization approach."

At the Inria Saclay Centre:  

• Diego Arias Cauas, a student of Civil Computer Engineering and the Master of Science with a specialization in Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science of the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at the Universidad de Chile, will carry out his internship on "Natural language querying of heterogeneous data lakes" in the CEDAR team, supervised by scientist Ioana Manolescu.

At the Inria Paris Centre: 

• Delaney Tello Espinoza, a student of Civil Computer Engineering and the Master's in Data Science in the Department of Computer Science of the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at the Universidad de Chile, will carry out her internship under the supervision of Chloé Clavel on the topic "Argument-Related Computation for Debate Mediation via Simulation" in the ALMANACH team.

At the Inria Lyon Centre: 

• Cristian Sánchez Olavarría, a student of Civil Industrial Engineering and the Master's in Operations Management in the Department of Industrial Engineering of the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at the Universidad de Chile, will carry out his internship under the supervision of Juan Andrés Fraire in the AGORA team on the topic "Learning Agentic Network-Server Proxies for Direct-to-Satellite IoT: from MILP-optimal schedules to on-board decision policies."

On September 30, Inria Chile invited all the selected students to gather at a meeting where Inria's Director of International Relations, Cécile Vigouroux, officially welcomed them to Inria. Following an information session given by Julia Allirot of Inria Chile, the students had the opportunity to hear about the experiences of two students who carried out their internships at Inria in early 2026 and 2025. These were Sergio Rojas and Carlos Antil, both students of the Universidad de Chile who carried out their internships with Ioana Manolescu on the CEDAR team at the Inria Center of Saclay and with Luce Brotcorne on the INOCS team at the Inria Center of Université de Lille, respectively.